I was almost disappointed that we weren’t.
“First time?” Dawlish asked me after the canopy came down and the six of us were nestled safe against the spare lances.
I nodded, not that the gesture meant much through the helmet.
“Saw you getting right in there,” said Flint merrily. “You’re a cold fish, Locke, but fuck me if you don’t have the instinct when it counts.”
Locke made no visible response but, again, suit. “If we make no kills, the whole voyage will be worthless.”
“Okay,” I tried, “but wedidnearly get crushed by a star-monster.”
Flint clapped me on the back. “It’s the life, girl. It’s the life. No risk, no reward.”
And at last I started laughing, and I didn’t stop.
When Q and I returned to our berth and I peeled myself out of my suit and threw myself into the shower I was still laughing.
I was still laughing when Q joined me. The cubicle was tiny but I appreciated the closeness, the way her tattoos glowed through the steam and the too-strong pulse of the recycled water.
“How are you so calm?” I asked her. My hands—now I looked—were shaking slightly.
She took my trembling fingers in hers and lifted them to her lips. “Mors certa,” she told me. “Hora incerta.”
It wasn’t the closest I’d ever come to dying. But it was the closest I’d come to dyingimpersonally, to simply being snuffed out by an indifferent cosmos. Assuming a Leviathan counted as indifferent, of course. The captain seemed to think otherwise.
Although I was grinning like a fool at the absurdity of it all, I felt tears stinging my eyes, and as the adrenaline of the chase started draining it was getting harder to speak and harder to think and honestly harder to stand, although in a shower space barely two feet square I didn’t have much option on that last one.
“We nearly died,” I said aloud.
Q nodded. Her eyes were a universe.
“We nearly died,” I repeated.
Q nodded again. Her hand, tracing my ribs to my hip, was comfort and torment and invitation all at once. “Sic sunt hominum fata,” she whispered, “sicut in arbore poma.” And then she added. “We die. But we live also.”
I wanted it to be comforting. It wasn’t quite. “I think…” I didn’t quite know what to say next without sounding selfish. Then again I’ve alwaysbeenselfish. At least that’s what the pastors told me. “I think I really need you to fuck me right now.”
So she did.
The water cut off—it was on a strict timer and we paid for it out of our lays—but I didn’t care. She pushed me against the wall with a passion I only ever saw when I asked for it, and she took me like the winds of Jupiter. And I laughed and cried and let myself fall apart.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREEThe Guide
I’d been called back to the captain’s cabin a few times in those first weeks. When the fire inside her burned too hot and threatened to swallow her and take the ship with it. And sometimes after she was done with me, I would lie in her bed, letting the sting fade from my back and the marks fade from my skin before returning to my duties.
It wasn’t quite an arrangement. It was nothing so formal. It was more a—it was a thing. A thing that happened sometimes.
On the wall above her bed, an array of slender ivory canes hung. Each one of them was beautiful, scrimshawed with images of the hunt and the skies and the stars and the beasts that lurk in the heavens. I’d been kissed by each one, and knew them all, and had given them names I’m not going to share.
While I rested, the captain would go about her business. Much of the time, it was unremarkable, the day-to-day minutiae of ship-work you’d get on any vessel in the service. But sometimes, as I lay with my eyes half closed and dreamed of monsters, I would hear her hard at work on some private plan.
Her ultimate goal, of course, was no secret. She’d told us all before we even made atmospheric contact what she sought. What she bent all her distorted genius towards. But thedetailsof it. The horror was in the detail.
Kneeling on the tatami mats before her low glass table, shewould work for hours at a time on a holographic chart. In the dark days of Old Earth, enterprising men had mapped the seas and continents of that blessed-and-cursed world. Repeating the feat on Jupiter was a whole ’nother thing. There were no fixed points on that planet, only variously stable atmospheric phenomena and the ever-shifting patterns of currents.
It hadn’t stopped the hunter-fleets. Storms and airstreams had been given names as if they were islands and rivers. The feeding grounds of Leviathans and the swarming grounds of Wyrms and the great slow paths of Behemoths had been tracked and collated and algorithmically correlated into a living map that shifted even as you tried to read it.
